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Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and the Tell Tale Text Messages
By Privacy Maven | January 24, 2008
No doubt, the last thing Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick expected was for thousands of sexually charged text messages he exchanged with chief of staff Christine Beatty to surface under the Freedom of Information Act. The case raises a multitude of issues as the Detroit Free Press reports.
Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his chief of staff lied about their relationship last summer at a police whistle-blower trial that has cost the cash-strapped city more than $9 million, according to records obtained by the Free Press.
The false testimony potentially exposes them to felony perjury charges, legal experts say.
Kilpatrick and chief of staff Christine Beatty denied during testimony in August that they had a sexual relationship. But the records, a series of text messages, show them engaged in romantic banter as well as planning and recounting sexual liaisons.
The messages are also at odds with the pair’s trial testimony that they did not fire Deputy Police Chief Gary Brown in 2003, an ouster that led him to sue. The text messages show Beatty recalling the “decision that we made to fire Gary Brown.”
The newspaper examined nearly 14,000 text messages on Beatty’s city-issued pager. The exchanges, which the Free Press obtained after the trial, cover two months each in 2002 and 2003.
The Kilpatrick-Beatty relationship and Brown’s dismissal were central to the whistle-blower suit filed by Brown and Harold Nelthrope, a former police officer and mayoral bodyguard. The two cops accused Kilpatrick of retaliating against them because of their roles in an internal affairs investigation of the mayor’s security team — a probe that potentially could have exposed the affair.
The Free Press sought interviews with Kilpatrick and Beatty, but they declined.
Late Wednesday, the mayor released a statement that said the text messages were “profoundly embarrassing” and “reflect a very difficult period” in his life.
“My wife and I worked our way through these intensely personal issues years ago,” he wrote.
The mayor’s statement did not address his or Beatty’s trial testimony.
The text messages cover a range of issues, from the daily minutiae of city business to political gossip to the latest doings on “American Idol.” Kilpatrick and Beatty, both 37, exchanged personal messages almost daily, including romantic notes.
“I’m madly in love with you,” Kilpatrick wrote on Oct. 3, 2002.
“I hope you feel that way for a long time,” Beatty answered. “In case you haven’t noticed, I am madly in love with you, too!”
Other texts contain sexual content, like this exchange on April 8, 2003:
Beatty: “And, did you miss me, sexually?”
Kilpatrick: “Hell yeah! You couldn’t tell. I want some more. “
The article continues. The Detroit Free Press has published numerous stories and posted video of the court testimony on the Web site. This video report from the Detroit Free Press summarizes the case and includes excerpts of the court ou can watch testimony.
Mayor Kilpatrick issued a statement on Wednesday, January 23.
“These five- and six-year-old text messages reflect a very difficult period in my personal life. It is profoundly embarrassing to have these extremely private messages now displayed in such a public manner.
“My wife and I worked our way through these intensely personal issues years ago. I would now ask that the public and the media respect the privacy of my wife and children and of Christine Beatty and her children at this deeply painful moment for our families.”
Are text messages private? Many of us may have never considered it one way or the other. The messages seem so ephemeral and under ordinary circumstances they are. Mike Wendland discusses text message privacy.
The scandal over the thousands of text messages between Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and chief of staff Christine Beatty has a lot of people wondering just how private their own messages are.
For most people, the answer is …don’t worry.
Just as cell phone calls are not recorded, neither are text messages.
Regular text messages sent through regular cell phones are not kept in any central repository. When you zap them from your phone they are, in almost all instances, forever zapped. There is no federal law requiring that they be stored or kept by the cell phone provider.
Text messaging is what the wireless companies call SMS for Short Message Service. It has become almost as popular as cell phone voice communications, with as many as 20 billion text messages being sent each month in the United States alone. Typically, text messages are 140 characters or less, sent via the data networks of the wireless providers from one device to another.
In the mayor’s case, the reason his messages have been exposed is because of the specialized service the city has contracted with to handle wireless communications between city officials. Although the scandal is already being dubbed BlackBerrygate by wags, the gizmo the mayor and Beatty used to communicate wasn’t a BlackBerry at all.
It was a SkyWriter, and although it looks a lot like a BlackBerry, it’s a dedicated messaging device provided to the city by SkyTel, a Mississippi-based wireless company that specializes in providing paging and messaging services to large corporations and governmental bodies through its own wireless network and devices.
“Every message sent over the SkyTel network … is recorded, including: Date and time the message was sent… ‘From’ address… ‘To’ address… Length of the message..Entire message content up to 2,000 characters ,” notes the company on its Web site in an article about the “benefits of message archiving.”
For major corporations and governments, the automatic archiving of such messages is important, where legal requirements mandate the storage of all business- or government-related communications. But tell the mayor that’s a benefit today.
The irony of the scandal is that if the mayor had used a regular cellphone and text messaging service from Verizon, AT&T or Sprint, there would be no record as those messages are simply passed through to the connected devices by the wireless companies and not stored on any master server anywhere.
The article continues. While most citizens may not confront Mayor Kilpatrick’s embarrassing predicament, it should prove warning. It goes without being said that public officials — and indeed all of us — must be truthful in sworn testimony. As the technology at our fingertips continues to evolve we may confront these situations, as spectators, as bill-footing taxpayers or as participants. We cannot assume we have privacy when using new technology. What we communicate and leave behind, may be beyond our power to remove or control.
Finally, as the Free Press points out, the $9 million could have been much better spent.
Detroit recreation centers have been closed and city workers have seen benefit and job cuts. The city has begun charging residents $300 a year for trash pickup to raise money. The $9 million paid to former cops Gary Brown, Harold Nelthrope and Walt Harris and for legal costs to settle their lawsuits may seem small in the context of the city’s $1.5-billion general fund budget, but it’s still enough to pay for:
Or… 143 firefighters
A starting firefighter makes $30,740 a year; benefits cost about $32,000.
Or… 126 police officers
A starting cop makes
up to $31,659 a year; benefits are $40,000.
Or… 1,200 abandoned homes demolished
$7,500 per home
Or.. more than 92 city parks
The mayor wants to raise $8.1 million by selling 92 parks.
Sources: Detroit firefighters union, Detroit Police Officers Association, mayor’s office, Free Press research
Topics: Public Figures and Privacy |